In recent years, liquid crystal display device is widely used to display information on the electronic products due to it is light and thin, and lower power consumption.
Liquid crystal display devices may be classified into two kinds as wide viewing angle and narrow viewing angle according to the range of viewing angle. Generally, there is a constraint on the viewing angle for the conventional Twisted Nematic (TN) liquid crystal display, i.e., the displayed contents may be seen clearly only at a specific viewing angle. To alleviate the constraint on the viewing angle of the liquid crystal display, and to make the user see the displayed contents clearly at any angle, there have proposed various technologies about wide viewing angle in the prior art, such as attaching viewing angle compensation film to the Liquid Crystal Display, Multi-domain Vertical Alignment Liquid Crystal Display, In-Plane-Switching Liquid Crystal Display. Although widening viewing angle technologies become the trend in the art, in some applications of liquid crystal displays, it is expected to constrain the viewing angle, such that user may see the images on the liquid crystal displays just at a specific angle to protect privacy.
In the prior art, a liquid crystal display with controllable viewing angle has been discussed. In Chinese Patent Application Publication CN1991466A, a modulation electrode is added to the In-Plane-Switching Liquid Crystal Display (in IPS display mode or FFS display mode) to achieve a conversion from wide viewing angle to narrow viewing angle. The viewing angle conversion liquid crystal display performs the conversion between a wide viewing angle and a narrow viewing angle, and therefore the wide viewing angle or the narrow viewing angle may be obtained respectively on the same liquid crystal display according to different requirements.
The prior art described above are all regard to the switch between the wide viewing angle and the narrow viewing angle. Although the technology for switching between the wide viewing angle and the narrow viewing angle may meet the requirements on safety and privacy, it may not meet the requirement on the diversification of viewing angle directions.